Friday, January 6, 2012

Scientist takes issue with Wyo. wolf plan

CHEYENNE — One of the five scientists retained by a federal
contractor to review Wyoming’s proposed wolf management plan states
in a recently released report that he sees shortcomings with
it.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service this week released a peer
review of Wyoming’s management plan for the gray wolf. The report
follows last summer’s agreement between Gov. Matt Mead and Interior
Secretary Ken Salazar to end federal protections for wolves in
Wyoming.

Their deal, which still needs approval from the state
Legislature, calls for the state to maintain at least 10 breeding
pairs and 100 wolves outside Yellowstone National Park. Wolves
would be protected as trophy game animals in northwestern Wyoming
in a flexible area outside the park but classified as predators
that could be shot on sight elsewhere.

Wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone and other areas in the
mid-1990s. The wolf population in the Northern Rockies has
rebounded since then to more than 1,600 animals, including more
than 300 in Wyoming.

While four of the scientists in the peer review generally
approved of the plan, wolf researcher John A. Vucetich, an
associate professor at Michigan Technological University in
Houghton, Mich., criticized it as vague and said it may
overestimate the annual mortality wolf populations can sustain. The
peer review report carries no legal weight.

Wyoming is anxious to get Congress to exempt its wolf management
plan from legal challenges, as it did earlier for state wolf plans
adopted by Idaho and Montana. Congress last month stripped a
similar proposed exemption for the Wyoming plan from a spending
bill, but state officials are hoping to resurrect it in some
form.

The Fish and Wildlife Service in 2007 endorsed an earlier
Wyoming management plan but later repudiated it after a federal
judge criticized it in response to a lawsuit file by environmental
groups. Future legal challenges are likely if Wyoming fails to
secure the legal immunity provision it wants.

In a telephone interview Thursday, Vucetich said he’s concerned
the current Wyoming plan is too vague. He noted, for example, that
it says Wyoming wants to kill wolves to reduce conflicts with elk
hunting, but said many people in the state might take that to mean
that there should be no wolves at all.

“It’s not that [wolf] hunting is necessarily incompatible with
recovery, but it sure can be,” Vucetich said. “And because of that,
it’s got to be done carefully. The thing that goes right along with
that is that’s not an abstract or general idea. Humans killing
wolves is the reason they’re endangered.”

Vucetich said he trusts current state officials who say that
they’re committed to keeping Wyoming’s wolf population at
sustainable levels. However, he said those people won’t always be
in their jobs and said the plan needs to stand on its own.

Mead said Wednesday that he’s pleased four of the five peer
reviewers said that Wyoming’s proposal is credible.

“We will analyze this review closely and address any points that
need further action,” Mead said. “I continue to be cautiously
optimistic that control of wolves will return to the state of
Wyoming.”

Steve Ferrell, wildlife and endangered species policy adviser to
Mead, said Thursday that Vucetich’s concerns should be easy for the
state to address.

Ferrell said the state has no intention of allowing the wolf
population to slip down to the minimum level of 100 wolves and 10
breeding pairs. “We’re going to manage for a little cushion above
that,” he said.

Chris Colligan, wildlife advocate with the Greater Yellowstone
Coalition in Jackson, said Thursday that Vucetich’s comments
reinforce some of the concerns his group has had all along that
Wyoming and the Fish and Wildlife Service are moving forward with a
faulty plan.

“Hopefully this opens up an opportunity to revise the plan and
get it right,” Colligan said.

The film offers an abbreviated history of the relationship between wolves and people—told from the wolf’s perspective—from a time when they coexisted to an era in which people began to fear and exterminate the wolves.

The return of wolves to the northern Rocky Mountains has been called one of America’s greatest conservation stories. But wolves are facing new attacks by members of Congress who are gunning to remove Endangered Species Act protections before the species has recovered.

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Inescapably, the realization was being borne in upon my preconditioned mind that the centuries-old and universally accepted human concept of wolf character was a palpable lie... From this hour onward, I would go open-minded into the lupine world and learn to see and know the wolves, not for what they were supposed to be, but for what they actually were.

-Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

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“If you look into the eyes of a wild wolf, there is something there more powerful than many humans can accept.” – Suzanne Stone